Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Dec 5, 2006

Filed under: Pictures 24 comments

Via Steven I find Dan’s Data, where in turn I find a link to Autostitch, a program that will take a whole bunch of pictures of the same scene and stitch them together to make one big honkin’ picture.

The program claims that it does this automagically. You just take a few dozen pics and Autostitch will fit them together, and at the same time weed out pictures that don’t belong to the set. You don’t need to do anything. They also claim that you can can make spherical panoramas this way.

This sounded a bit too good to be true. Spherical imaging is tough. Imagine. You’re standing on a hill. You stay in place (most importantly, keep the camera in place) and shoot the whole scene: All around, up, down, everything. Then you take those pics and give them to Autostitch, and it will piece them all together, correcting for varying levels of brightness, allowing for differering white-balance, correcting for slight parallaxing (because a human being is holding the camera and it’s bound to move a bit), and it will do it with no hints from the user as to how the images are supposed to fit together.

I had to see this in action for myself, so this weekend I took a bunch of pictures of my home office and gave it a try. It worked. See the results below the fold.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autostitch”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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24 comments

DM of The Rings XXXVII:
Intervention Interruptus

By Shamus Posted Monday Dec 4, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 42 comments

 DM of the Rings XXXVI:
Hates the Dice! Hates Them Forever!Previous Post

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As Simple as Calculus 

Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Lots of Orcs, Need loot, Need XP, Need babes

The Circle of Fantasy Roleplaying Life:

Enchantment:You begin a new campaign. How exciting! As you play, you will eventually experience…
Disillusionment: You notice all the flaws in the campaign. Loot distribution is uneven. The house rules outnumber the core rules, and the only person who knows these house rules is the DM. Some players (not you) are taking center stage. Some players greatly overpower others. The plot is on rails and none of the NPCs are likeable. You decide to cope with this through…
Long Suffering: Deal with it – bad DMs happen. Give the guy a chance to learn. When the campaign gets worse it will be time to engage in…
Sabotage: Try to run the campaign off the rails and kill off major characters, just to break free and do something that isn’t being imposed on you. If you’re still not having fun…
Confrontation: Talk to the DM and let him or her know your concerns. If this doesn’t transform them into a great DM, then you may be obliged to resort to…
Coup d’état: Get the players together and tell the DM that his work just isn’t cutting it. Appoint someone else to run the campaign. However, the DM might mange to retain power. If he owns all the books, all the dice, and you meet at his house, then kicking him out isn’t usually an option. If you can’t depose him, then the only thing left is…
Exile: Make up some lame excuse about getting a girlfriend / boyfriend or a new job and find a new gaming group. Then the cycle begins anew.

It has its low moments, but I still love this game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings XXXVI:
Hates the Dice! Hates Them Forever!Previous Post

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As Simple as Calculus 

42 comments

Darth Vader Being a Jerk

By Shamus Posted Sunday Dec 3, 2006

Filed under: Movies 4 comments

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If I gave in to the dark side and became super-powerful, I wouldn’t waste my time conquering the galaxy. I’d spend my days doing stuff like this:

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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4 comments

Halo Heresy

By Shamus Posted Saturday Dec 2, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 49 comments

 Morrowwind: Dagoth-UrPrevious Post

Next PostGalactic Civilizations 2 

Edit: August 19, 2010. I wrote this article years ago, at the end of 2006. At the time, I had no idea about the flame war over Halo. I thought everyone loved the game and so I felt the need to express what a profound disappointment it was. Now I see that the stuff I said below has been said a thousand times before and this article is basically unintentional flame bait.

Yeah. I didn’t think Halo was fun at all, but this is hardly a radical position. After a couple of years with an Xbox 360 I’ve had a great deal of fun with console titles, but console shooters still don’t appeal to me. It’s like playing a round of golf with a rake instead of clubs. It just feels wrong.

Read on if you must, but this isn’t going to say anything new.

Below is pure heresy. I suppose I will be excommunicated from various gamer forums, and no doubt I’ll be censured by all right-thinking folks, but let me just nail this thesis to the door of EB Games, and then you guys can do whatever you feel you need to do in response. Here it is: Halo is one of the worst FPS I’ve ever played.

So I’m going to burn through a few paragraphs and get this out of my system. The rest of this post is just going to be me beating on that long-dead horse, so I suggest you skip it. Maybe check out this great bit on Unreal Tournament 2008.

Really. Halo came out in 2001. Why would you want to read about it now?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Halo Heresy”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Morrowwind: Dagoth-UrPrevious Post

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49 comments

DM of the Rings XXXVI:
Hates the Dice! Hates Them Forever!

By Shamus Posted Friday Dec 1, 2006

Filed under: DM of the Rings 124 comments

 DM of the Rings XXXV:
A Dubious VictoryPrevious Post

Next PostDM of The Rings XXXVII:
Intervention Interruptus 

River Anduin, Legolas, Gollum, Critical Strike, Standing Watch

The most terrifying part of any campaign is when the players at last wiggle free of your grasp and escape the railroad plot you’ve devised.

This marks the first time our hapless group has broken from the plot as set down by Tolkien himself. What does this mean? Is the whole thing going off the rails now? Has our hapless DM finally lost control? Will he cheat in order to stick to his predetermined script?

Beats me.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings XXXV:
A Dubious VictoryPrevious Post

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Intervention Interruptus 

124 comments

Morrowwind: Dagoth-Ur

By Shamus Posted Friday Dec 1, 2006

Filed under: Game Reviews 21 comments

 Scrapland: JunkyPrevious Post

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AngiePen left a comment on this post talking about games with lots of replay value. The comment reminded me of one of the reasons I loved Morrowwind so much: The villian was great.

When I think of Dagoth-Ur, I think of Boromir. That’s a bit like what he was like. Imagine if Aragorn had the ring of power, and he left it with Boromir while he ran off to talk with Elrond and Gandalf about what they should do with the ring. At the end Dagoth-Ur was certainly evil, but he was still lucid and had some interesting goals. He even regrets that he must face you (the player / chosen one) at the end of the game, because he respects you. The final conversation is long and interesting. You can ask him all sorts of questions if you like, and none of his answers are, “BECAUSE YOU WILL ALL PAY, HAHAHAHA!” Instead, you get a glimpse of a once-great man who was given more power than he could handle and who was then betrayed by his friends. He has some great questions to ask the player (how many games have the wit to do that?) which make him seem even more real.

This is tricky to pull off: To get the player to connect with the villian, yet still see the need to defeat him. I can’t think of another game to do this.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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21 comments

A Nod of Thanks

By Shamus Posted Thursday Nov 30, 2006

Filed under: Notices 3 comments

 DM of the Rings ArchivesPrevious Post

Next PostWarning 

I complained about Google Ads when I put them in. Since then they have begun behaving themselves, and are offering just the right sort of stuff. There are lots of offers for videogames and dice, which is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. I added a few dice images here and there on this site with a bunch of geek-culture keywords in the description. I don’t know if that’s what fixed it, but it’s working fine now. (Mouse over the d20 at the top of the sidebar to see what I mean.)

More to the point, the income is almost perfectly offsetting the bandwidth overages. In the beginning I was worried that this would be a bunch of visual clutter and it wouldn’t really help, but after all of this traffic and all of these hits the income is within a dollar or two of my expenses. That is a really great solution that scales with usage. It doesn’t have that unseemly “panhandling” feeling of using a tipjar, and it isn’t too ugly or annoying. Someday DMotR will complete its run (we’re over 1/3 of the way through the story already) and I’ll take the ads down, but in the meantime this is a great way to keep things from going in the red.

Thanks to everyone who clicked. I hope it was because you saw something you liked.

Thanks again.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 DM of the Rings ArchivesPrevious Post

From The Archives:

Bad and Wrong Music Lessons

D&D Campaign

Who Broke the In-Game Economy?

The Best of 2019

Artless in Alderaan

Zenimax vs. Facebook

The Plot-Driven Door

Stolen Pixels

The Middle Ages

A Telltale Autopsy